Hubs and Cabling.

That'll be fine, unless your home is the source of some serious electrical interference! That said, 5e is pretty much a standard these days and not really much more expensive than standard 5, so I'd run that as a matter of good practice if you're talking a permanent install.

Where you might need to look at better cabling is if you want to run at gigabit speeds - I've never tried through anything less than 5e (which in my experience can handle gigabit just fine.)
 
I agree with berry.

Also if you're setting something up at home, I highly recommend a switch versus a hub.
 
I didn't know that someone still uses hubs, If you have at home not many computers it will be fine
 
I hear it takes about 30 computers to fill up a broadcast domain so your hub will be fine especially since it's free. I have two myself that I want to try out when I get the time.
 
Your hub is fine unless you start to experience specific broadcast issues. Also, no point in upgrading cables if you're on a 100mb pipe.
 
Hubs don't know which computer the data goes to so it goes to all of them. It winds up being the job of the computer to figure out what data is for it. On the other hand switches learn to a small extent and route the data to the computer that it's entented for. Switches are getting low cost with good quaility. Get a switch...
 
Agreed with setishock. The problem with hubs is that due to the way they work (sending all the data everywhere) you get loads of collisions between packets, which mean that those packets are destroyed and have to be resent. Now I'm using a hub on an old, low traffic network of 3 PCs that's non critical. That sort of use is absolutely fine and not going to cause any issues at all really. Definitely nothing noticeable.

However, whack many more PCs on there with higher traffic and you'll really notice things start to slow down and become more unreliable. A decent switch effectively eliminates collisions so solves this problem, and switches these days are pretty much the same price as hubs. I'd seriously consider investing in a switch, you will notice the difference if you're using more than 3 PCs with moderate to heavy network usage!
 
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